Pillow Talk

The LBI Bible Conference has a package with a modest, but clean room that includes a set of bunk beds, two queen-sized beds, a small bathroom, and three-square meals a day for only $77/person for an entire weekend. That’s a pretty good deal, despite the fact that I always get a headache from spending 72-hours solid with my family.

We all got there late Friday night, so as soon as we walked into our assigned room, my cousin collapsed onto the nearest bed. She was exhausted from the nearly two-hour drive filled with criticizing, agonizing, and general GPS worshipping. I decided I needed a break as well, so I threw my bag on one of the beds and fingered my pocket for my cell phone.

I looked over at my mother who was noisily rummaging through piles tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches. “Anyu, I’ll be right back.”

She furrowed her brow, “Vait, vait, vait, vhere are you goink?”
“I just want to call my boyfriend to let him know we got here okay, I’ll be right outside the door.”
“Nooooo! Somevon is going to steal you, Stephie!”

“What the heck are you talking about? I am a 6-foot tall adult on a Bible Conference compound in the middle of an island that only has one bridge to the mainland. No one is going to ‘steal me’!”
“I heard on 20/20, when you are on dah cell phone and not paying attention, dey can push you in the car. You stay here and talk.”

“Irina is trying to sleeping, we’re probably disturb-”

My cell phone started ringing and vibrating to the theme song to “The Super Mario Brothers Super Show”. I didn't even need to check the caller I.D.

“Anyu, it’s him, I’m gonna go out for a second.”

“Nooooo! Stay here!”

“Why, so you can listen to my conversation?”

“I don’t care about vhat stupid crap you talk about, just don’t go outside.”

“I don’t understand this. I’ve lived on my own for eight years, I’ve walked through West Philly at midnight and I’m fine.”

“Sometimes vhen you're here, I can't handle it, so I vorry. If you die in Philly, it’s your own stupid fault, but if someting happens vhen you are in front of me, I vill never be able to forgive myself. You’re not gonna die on my vatch!”

“Would you people please shut the hell up?” said the pile of blankets that used to be my cousin.

I rolled my eyes. My phone lit up with the message, "One missed call."

“Forget it, I’m going to go talk in the bathroom.”

I ran into the bathroom, shut the door, and pressed my speed dial.

“Hey, hun, we’re here!" I said, happy to speak to a friendly voice that didn't nag me. "Oh, and don’t mind me if I sound echoey, I have to sit on the toilet to talk to you because mom doesn’t want me going outside. No. I am not actually ‘on’ the toilet, I am just sitting on top of it. Yes, my pants are on...”

There was an urgent knock on the door followed by a shrill, “Stephiiiie!” My mother yanked the door open.

“What?! Do you need to pee or something?” I asked, attempting to shield the phone from the reverberating shouting.

She pushed past me into the tiny bathroom with a bunch of pillows tucked underneath her arms. “Princess Stephanie! I brought you pillows for your throne!”

My boyfriend overhead and started laughing, “Did she just call you ‘Princess’?”

“She’s only saying that to show off because you’re on the phone...Oh, my gosh, she’s putting pillows on the toilet...”

My mom shook her finger at me, “Don’t look so crazy, I just don’t vant your ass to catch cold. Now sit.”

“That’s freaking gross. I don’t want to sleep on toilet-pillows! GET OUT OF HERE!”

“So, put towels between the pillows so dey don’t get germy...”

With all the shouting, pillow poofing, and towel tossing, the bathroom suddenly felt very claustrophobic. “Anyu! Fine! I will sit on the pillows. But please, get out, I'm on the phone!”

At that very second, another phone started ringing in the distance. Anyu dropped everything and sprinted out of the bathroom, “Oh, dat’s Sophie on dah line, I have to catch it!”

“Good,” I said to my boyfriend, who was still laughing in the background, “Someone called Irina’s cell phone, so at least now Mom will be distracted. God, sitting on this thing is weird, I feel like I am ready to lay a darned egg or something. So. How was your day?”

As he started to speak, my mom yanked the door open. She was awkwardly holding my cousin’s cell phone and screaming into it from three inches away. “Oh, Sophie, Stephie is here vit me, Stephie, say, ‘Hi’ to Sophie.” She shoved the phone in my free ear.

“Ah! Ah! Sensory overload!” I screamed.

My boyfriend chimed in, “You know what, hun, I’ll just call you back when your mother isn’t there. And you aren’t talking on two phones. On a pillow. On a toilet. Have a, um....fun?Vacation?”

“Yeah, wish you were here.”

“Yeah, well, no offense, but I’m pretty glad I’m not!”

Photo by Christian Kitazume

Speech Class

Growing up, everyone in my household spoke Hungarian, so I only knew a little bit of English from television (good thing we didn't have cable!) Once I was old enough to attend kindergarten, my family assumed I knew enough English to get by. That was a big mistake.

On the first day of school, Nagymama walked me to the classroom and waived goodbye without explaining the intricacies of elementary school. “See you in a few hours,” she said in Hungarian, as she turned, shut the door behind her, and walked away.

I stared at the door for a moment until I heard a voice behind me that sounded like the parental figures in the old "Charlie Brown" cartoons.

“Wa wa!” the voice said. I turned around to I see an entire roomful of strangers looking back at me. A tall matronly woman was offering me her hand, "Wa wee wa?" I stood there, stunned, and realized that everyone in the room must be aliens from Mars since I could not understand what they were saying. I panicked, climbed up to the side window, and cried for Nagymama through the glass. Alas, she was already halfway up the parking lot and couldn’t hear me. The teacher dragged me away from that window kicking and screaming.

I must have gotten over the language barrier, because in my next childhood memory, I could speak English fluently...but vit un accent and a stah-studd-stutter. I had to attend an English as a Second Language (ESL) class in order to get over my linguistic problems. I always hated going to ESL because they would make me color. Even at that young age, I couldn’t understand how coloring would help me learn English and I had no patience for the arduous activity. To make matters worse, they forced me to recite tongue twisters in front of five other kids, and I was the worst one in the group.

One day, my kindergarten teacher was reading everyone a story about owls on the magic circular carpet, and my ESL teachers came to collect me. "Stephie, time for your speech lessons,” my teacher said, getting ready to flip to the next page of the storybook.

“No! I na…na…na…need to know vhat is happened to dah owl!” I screamed. Eventually, the two unfortunate ESL teachers had to drag me by my armpits down the hall into the other room. They stuck me in a chair next to some other, better behaved students and immediately placed a picture of a teddy bear in front of me.

“Color it,” the ESL teacher commanded, unable to shield her aggrivation.

I grabbed a brown crayon, scribbled on it, and screamed, “Done!” I went off to pout in the corner while the other five students painstakingly colored within the lines.

After a bit of pouting, the other, much nicer Speech teacher came over to me and whispered in my ear, “If you complete your lessons, I will give you a magic sticker to put on your ESL Book. It’s magic because it smells like fruit if you scratch it.”

Magical items, oh boy! Not only did the bribery work, but I was the envy of all the other students in my kindergarten class. From that day forward, every time I returned from ESL class, kids would run over to scratch the Magical Sticker until nothing was left but a pathetic piece of peeling paper that smelled like chemically-treated grapes mixed with grubby fingers.

Once that little notebook was covered in stickers, I did not have to attend ESL ever again. Go figure, Robert Fulghum was right when he wrote “All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” Case in point:

A.) Before kindergarten, I hated coloring -> I went to school for animation, which is nothing more than glorified coloring.

B.) Before kindergarten, I had a stuttering problem -> I now do professional voiceover work.

C.) Before kindergarten, I hated public speaking -> All I freakin' do these days is host live events where I speak publicly, and I don't even receive rewards of fruit-scented paraphanalia!

D.) I had a European Accent -> It’s gone. This makes me sad. My mother still has her lovely blended Hungarian/Transylvanian accent, and if you ask me, it sounds sexy. Apparently, I now I have a Minnesotan accent. This is the one thing that never ceases to boggle my mind as I’ve never even BEEN to Minnesota! I am convinced that one of my ESL teachers must have wiped my brain clean and inserted her own accent into it. Either that or huffing all those scented stickers must have somehow warped my brain, oh, golly gee gosh, don’tcha know?

To sum it all up, I firmly believe that there is only one vital piece of information that I am missing from my kindergardten "edu-ma-cation"....What the heck happened to that stupid owl?

Photo by Sophie

A Typical Thanksgiving

My family is pretty small, so they never want to prepare a full, traditional Thanksgiving. Instead, they prefer to go to the HomeGrown Buffet* (*name changed to protect the innocent), wait in the cold for 45 minutes to get a table, and feast amongst the other dregs of society.

Now before you crucify me, let me tell you that I typically like buffets. Sure, the food has been sitting out for a while and some little kid stuck his booger finger in the mac & cheese, but what the hell do you expect for $5.95 a head? But even with my general thriftiness, it somehow seems sacrilegious to go to a buffet on Thanksgiving (especially the HomeGrown Buffet, which is the “Motel 6 Express” equivalent of food service).

Years ago, I begged my mom to let me cook dinner and she got worried that I would burn the house down. Rather than argue, my cousin and I split the cost of one of those pre-made Thanksgiving dinners from the local grocery store. I was quite pleased with the relative ease and inexpensiveness of the meal, but my mother was extremely unhappy.
“Dese yams are shitty,” she said, as she took another bite of the creamed orange goo. “So, mom, next year we won’t buy them.”“Screw it, I vant to go back to da buffet. I like hafing a variety of foods.”

I don’t think “variety” is the right word. My family likes to eat the same food every single time, but they like the idea of having an endless supply of it to “play with”. Mom typically gets a piece of broiled fish that she mashed into a pile of powdered mashed potatoes, beets, corn, and chicken gravy. I think she likes making this concoction more than she likes to eat it, because she usually swirls it around for a while, talks to my aunt, swirls it some more, and then throws it out because it’s cold. This usually happens four or five times.Nagymama also really likes the idea of multiple servings…of cake, more cake, and nothing but the cake. My mom and aunt try to feed her some meat and potatoes, but she usually just stuffs the drumsticks in her purse and reaches for the carrot cake. She usually grabs a piece for herself, realizes that we don’t have any cake, so she places it in front of us, yells at us to eat it, and runs back up to the buffet as if they were running out of the stuff. This also usually happens four or five times. It’s actually kind of cute, but gets old quick when you realize that she’s stuffed cake into the pocket of her pants and you are the one that has to launder it.

In addition to the horrors of eating piles of pastries next to processed turkey fat with mushy stuffing and grape jelly instead of cranberry sauce, Nagymama is a bit hard of hearing and my family is naturally very loud. Like…REALLY loud. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed people move tables just so they aren’t near us. This usually doesn’t stop Nagymama from running up to adjacent tables and following small children around the restaurant and patting them on the head. People usually think its sweet, but after a few minutes, it gets a little creepy when she doesn’t stop patting and they notice that she has cake and salad dressing on her fingers.

So, although everyone means well, our Thanksgiving usually ends up being an unnecessarily overindulgent, sticky mess. But if you think about it, there actually is something very uniquely “American” about that!

Photo courtesy of Garrison Photography